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Fishfoo's IM170 EXT (1 Viewer)

SliceGolfer said:
Super clean build. Great job deploying the mechanicals in the cabinet. Any pics of your wire management?
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Thanks. Unfortunately I'm still no where near complete with wire management, but once I am I will take a pic. Still need to order a few more things before that happens though..
 
So shame on my I know, but since filling this tank with water I never once checked Alk. I also hadn’t check Nitrate, Ammonia and Nitrite since the cycle completed ~2 months ago. Chalk it up to a a combination of laziness and summer being a busy time. I measured all of these tonight, aside from PO4 as I need to order more reagent packets. Results below:

Alk: 5.9
Nitrate: 0
Nitrite: 0
Ammonia: 0

Not great... somehow the test corals still look great and they’re the only corals in there at the moment so I’m not too worried. I’m thinking the coralline I seeded the tank with is using up most of the Alk, which is already on the low end from the start due to the salt I use (Tropic Marin Pro Reef). My plan to raise/maintain Alk is to do a fairly large water change and then put kalkwasser in the ATO as I do for the 40.

To remedy 0 nitrates, I plan on adding more fish and dosing NO3 until those fish arrive and are quarantined. I had a feeling they had bottomed out as I was seeing some cyano pop up. The automatic filter roller is doing too good of a job!!

In other news: I finally purchased a skimmer (Nyos Quantum 160). Still getting it dialed in but I like what I see so far.

That’s pretty much it. I’m going to start putting rock and bio-media from my 40 into this tank this week to help further seed the dry rock. Still not completely comfortable with the idea of transferring things just yet.
 
Fishfoo said:
Wow no update since May... Current FTS to make up for it?


Right after the system got wet there was a big Dino outbreak that I was able to get under control, however it's still somewhat present. I also seeded it with coraline bits taken from my 40 gallon, and I'm now seeing spots of coraline everywhere! success! Other types of algae are still beating it out at the moment, which is fine. The initial cleanup crew I added doesn't seem like it's keeping up so I may double the workers. Other than that I'm just letting things run their course.

In June I added the four flame wrasse, as well as a yellow tang. One of the flames was already dominant over the others in qt, but within a month of being in the display, he began the transition to male. Every week his reds and yellows seem to become more and more vibrant, and he has developed quite the personality. This is the first time I've had a wrasse transition, mainly due to always purchasing males. However, I think I may follow the strategy of @OldNemo and mainly buy wrasse in their initial phase. It's very rewarding to see one transition, and the odds are more favorable that an initial phase wrasse is fairly young, meaning it more than likely will live longer than a super male (that's my thinking at least). Plus, initial phase are cheaper :) I'm hoping the other three stay as females, but know it's probably only a matter of time before another begins transitioning.

Male: July


Male next to Female for comparison: July


I also added the Lunatus into the RSR from my 40gal. With all of the corals, frag racks and the drop in UV sterilizer, there was hardly any space for him to swim around. Now I'm sure he's much happier! I finally got some decent photos of him as well.







I've added three tester LPS/Zoa corals, along with a tiny rbta and all have been doing well for over a month now. I still need to purchase a skimmer, as well as another powerhead or two before I can feel confident transferring all of the contents from the 40gal to the RSR. With how busy I've been this summer it's been easy to just wait and let the tank mature further. No sense in rushing it if I don't have to.
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Love the aquascape. Reminds me of a. Star Wars panorama or view of their accent onto a new planet.
 
Fishfoo said:
Wow no update since May... Current FTS to make up for it?


Right after the system got wet there was a big Dino outbreak that I was able to get under control, however it's still somewhat present. I also seeded it with coraline bits taken from my 40 gallon, and I'm now seeing spots of coraline everywhere! success! Other types of algae are still beating it out at the moment, which is fine. The initial cleanup crew I added doesn't seem like it's keeping up so I may double the workers. Other than that I'm just letting things run their course.

In June I added the four flame wrasse, as well as a yellow tang. One of the flames was already dominant over the others in qt, but within a month of being in the display, he began the transition to male. Every week his reds and yellows seem to become more and more vibrant, and he has developed quite the personality. This is the first time I've had a wrasse transition, mainly due to always purchasing males. However, I think I may follow the strategy of @OldNemo and mainly buy wrasse in their initial phase. It's very rewarding to see one transition, and the odds are more favorable that an initial phase wrasse is fairly young, meaning it more than likely will live longer than a super male (that's my thinking at least). Plus, initial phase are cheaper :) I'm hoping the other three stay as females, but know it's probably only a matter of time before another begins transitioning.

Male: July


Male next to Female for comparison: July


I also added the Lunatus into the RSR from my 40gal. With all of the corals, frag racks and the drop in UV sterilizer, there was hardly any space for him to swim around. Now I'm sure he's much happier! I finally got some decent photos of him as well.







I've added three tester LPS/Zoa corals, along with a tiny rbta and all have been doing well for over a month now. I still need to purchase a skimmer, as well as another powerhead or two before I can feel confident transferring all of the contents from the 40gal to the RSR. With how busy I've been this summer it's been easy to just wait and let the tank mature further. No sense in rushing it if I don't have to.
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These pictures are awesome!
 
Finished getting the right cabinet setup and organized somewhat.




Since the apex is only temporary as I plan on purchasing a Profilux in the future, I haven't spent much time and effort organizing the wires on the other side of the wall. This will do for now :)


Some new additions. Tiny little guys!
 
Part 1

Long overdue update. I have a feeling this will turn into a long one. I’ll probably split it up into sections to make it a bit easier. Let’s start with a FTS


Fish: 18
2x Watanabei Angelfish
4x Flame Wrasse
2x Leopard Wrasse
Lunate Wrasse
Linespot Wrasse
Borbonius Anthias
3x Bartlett’s Anthias
Black Tang
Tomini Tang
2x Black Ice (?) Clownfish

In Quarantine: 3
Copperband Butterfly
Green Mandarin
Tiny Convict Tang (For 40G tank that was turned into an anemone tank)

The Bioload of 18 fish is definitely doing the trick at raising and stabilizing nitrates/phosphate. For the most part everyone gets along and are healthy as can be. The two leopard wrasses just came out of qt, and have shown me an equally important reason to quarantine fish other than for disease treatment and prevention.

When I first got them, they wouldn’t eat anything I tried and hid in the pvc pipes a majority of the days. Around day 3, they finally took to some cyclopods. A week and a half into qt they started to eat mysis/LRS, and 3 weeks in they were eating flake food the moment it hit the water and would come up to the front of the glass anytime I was near the tank. I strongly believe that, potential diseases aside, if I would’ve just dropped them into my display where they had to fight 12 other established fish for food, which they didn’t know was food in the first place, their chances of survival would’ve been extremely low (Keep in mind each of them are no more than 2 inches long). In qt they were able to grow accustomed to myself, and the foods offered at their own, uncontested pace. I feel this increases their success in captivity tenfold.

Too much text, here’s some pics













This guy will constantly flash throughout the day, and has the best personality in the tank


One of the three females looking not so female anymore… could spell trouble



The leopards are hard to accurately capture/represent, but I’ll keep working on it. The black tang is impossible to get a good pic of so I gave up on him. Also he tries to stab me with his caudal spines anytime I put my hand in the tank so we’re not friends at the moment.
 
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Part 2

Equipment wise, no new additions that I can think of but everything is running well and I’m happy with what I chose for this build. I did add a shower loofa to the sump as a pod hotel, and ordered a few jars of pods from AlgaeBarn.

Onto the corals. Things were going smooth in the beginning until around October. Around that time is when a lot of things seemed to be going wrong. For starters, I couldn’t keep Alk stable, not even with the GHL KHD. This caused some alk spikes which led to burnt tips and unhappy sps.

My solution: I was using the 4th dosing line on my GHL doser to dose TM All-For-Reef, which was influenced via the Adaptive mode on my KHD depending on my nominal KH value was and what the most recent test read. Along with this, I had kalkwasser in the ATO container like I’ve had for most my years in this hobby. The only issue is that the KHD cannot influence the dosage of kalk, which was dosing more than my corals were consuming at the time. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to realize this, but once I stopped supplementing the ATO water with kalk and let the All-For-Reef be the sole alk/ca additive, the KHD was able to dial in my nominal dKH and keep it there. I’ll add kalk back into the routine once my daily consumption increases some more, but for now it’ll remain offline.

Another thing that probably didn’t help was me removing all of my 3+ year old live rock from the tank and back into the 40 gallon. It was taking away from the aesthetics of the scape and I figured the good bacteria on this rock would’ve colonized on the new rock by now. Instead, this lead to even more unhappy sps.

My solution: This one was simple. I added most of it back in, and this time I tucked it behind one of the rock structures so that it was out of sight.

Lastly, I was still fighting to keep detectable NO3 and PO4 levels, which led to manual dosing and constant rising and falling of these parameters. I also tried a carbon dosing method that I was told was specifically tailored to ULNS systems called TM Plus N/P. It was supposed to work by dosing bacteria along with food (no3 and po4) in trace amounts for the bacteria to consume, and then the corals would consume the bacteria as it’s easier for them to consume that then straight po4 through the water column. For me all it did was strip my phosphates down to the point that my rocks were no longer buffered with any po4. And you guessed it, very unhappy sps.

My solution: I first took the carbon dosing offline. Then I added PO4 (Brightwell’s NeoPhos) to the system daily, while keeping an eye on NO3 and raising when needed. For close to a week I was dosing 2.0 (not .02 or .20) daily before I saw detectable PO4. That was insane to me. However once they were detectable was right around the time some fish were ready to go into the display from qt, and this helped stabilize things.

Huge shoutout to @DarkSky for babysitting the angriest of my corals while I tackled all of these issues. Thanks Jeremy!

Over Black Friday I purchased my first Battlebox and was pretty impressed with the pieces. I gave him a rough outline of what I was looking for (Pinks, Tenuis, Tables) and Adam delivered. The two that didn’t make it (BC Hawaii and Miss Scarlett) through shipping he said he’d resend in the next box which I’m more than ok with. The rest are still doing well and I’m excited to watch them grow. Now I’ll shut up for good and post pictures.


BC Bliss


BC Aquatic-Man


BC Rose Vine


BC Rainbow Brite


BC Backdraft


BC Bonfire


TGC Inner Core


BC No Name Table


BC Pink On Pink (Very excited for this one)


BC Pink Cigarette
 
Part 3 is just a photo dump :) Now I'm all caught up for the most part.



























 
Sure, it’s pretty basic.

Setup is a 20 gallon tall tank. Hob filter with some floss that was soaked in either microbacter7 or biospira for 24 hours. There’s a heater, an air pump (really helps with the prazi/gc treatment), and that’s about it. Some pvc pipe in there as well for hiding.

Few days of observation
- 2 rounds of Prazi or General Cure (no need for both)
- 14 days copper at 2.0 (mainly to preventatively treat for velvet, not ich as I’m sure it’s in my system from the old live rock that was originally in the 40 gallon)
- During this entire time I also feed assorted foods soaked in Metro bound by Focus
 
I think that is my favorite Aquascape of all time. Just awesome! Really like the look of the tank with the black scraped off the back. Looks like a Broadfield inspired tank.
 
Adam G said:
I think that is my favorite Aquascape of all time. Just awesome! Really like the look of the tank with the black scraped off the back. Looks like a Broadfield inspired tank.
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Thanks, Adam. And yes I definitely got the idea from Broadfield and thought it would work well on this tank since the wall behind it is white. I was nervous at first but like how it turned out!
 
Looking good Keenan! I think you need to come over a snap some pics for me! :cool:
 
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